


Foundations

by chiiyo86



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Group Sex, Hand Jobs, Kissing, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-12-21 08:00:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21071561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: As they comfort Richie and each other after defeating It, the Losers are struck by a terrible thought: will they start forgetting each other again when they leave Derry? To prevent that, they will have to hold on to each other.





	Foundations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).

> What I love about the Losers, whether the book or the movie version, is how much they _love_ each other. Your prompt of them having sex to prevent themselves from forgetting each other was just what I needed to write! 
> 
> Hope you enjoy this treat. :)

Richie couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried like this. He’d gotten misty-eyed, sure, had maybe shed a few tears, quickly wiped with the edge of a thumb, but it must have been at least a decade since he’d actually sobbed. Now he knew why he wasn’t doing it more often—that shit fucking _hurt_. It arose from his gut, tore through his chest and crushed his lungs on its way out. Wasn’t any fun at all.

It was just so fucking unfair. Unfair that they’d won and Eddie wasn’t there to share the sweet, sweet taste of victory with them. Unfair that they’d had to abandon him deep underground, with the rubbles and decaying dead bodies and the remains of Derry’s hidden evil—all alone with that motherfucking cannibal clown, forever. Unfair that when Richie might just have found the nerves to say certain things, the opportunity to do so had been pulled from under his feet. And Eddie, who finally might have been able to live without fear, now simply didn’t live at all. 

Richie felt lips press against the skin of his right arm, the one that Bill was clinging to. A new sob ripped through him, this time tinged with a bit of self-pity because he was so fucking pathetically grateful for his friends. Bill had threaded his fingers through Richie’s, Bev was wrapped around his arm on his other side, her head nestled in the crook of his neck, Mike was pressed against his back and Ben was in front of him, his fingers grazing Richie’s arm as though he feared a firmer touch would shatter Richie. All of them grown-ass adults clinging to each other like little kids, like they’d done all those years ago after their first fight against It, with a total absence of self-consciousness that was at odds with the way Richie usually handled physical contact with others. 

“Thank you,” Richie finally said, because if he didn’t put an end to this he thought they might keep hugging him forever, standing in shitty water until they caught pneumonia or strep or something. “I don’t have my glasses so I don’t know who you people are, but thank you.”

He looked down at them as they laughed at his stupid joke, laughed because they loved him rather than because it had truly been funny. Without his glasses they looked like pale blobs of various sizes—well, Mike was a brown blob and Bev was a pale blob topped with some red—but his mind easily supplied him with what they looked like, as detailed as if he’d had years to study their adult faces. That first night at the Jade of the Orient he’d had a dizzying moment of superposing the strange adult faces with the faces of the children he’d known so well, but after only a day it was like they’d never been apart at all and he’d seen them grow up alongside him. They were the best friends he’d ever had, and wasn’t that a terrible commentary on the state of his social life as an adult? Or maybe the Losers had set such a standard for friendship in his mind that even after forgetting them he’d subconsciously measured to them every other buddy he’d had, and found everyone coming short. 

“Hey,” he said, struck by a sudden, terrifying thought. “Do you think that when we’ll get out of this shithole of a town, we’ll start forgetting each other all over again?”

The thought turned his guts into blocks of ice. Sure, there might be a tiny part of him that felt it could be quite nice to forget the pain and the fear they’d endured, but the rest of him was horrified. He’d spent his whole life feeling like there was something off, something wrong with him, some essential cog that he was missing. He’d thought it was how his mind always ran too fast and his mouth even faster, getting him into all kind of shit, or maybe the other, more deeply buried thing—his _dirty little secret_, as Pennywise the fucking dancing clown had put it. But now he thought that part of his problem was forgetting all this, his childhood and his friends and the huge thing they’d accomplished together, the foundations on which normal people built themselves on. Without his memories he’d been like the fucking Tower of Pisa, listing to the side, threatening to collapse at any moment. Maybe this was why he felt so intensely about them, about his friends who he hadn’t seen in over two decades; maybe if they’d been allowed to fall out of touch the usual way, the memories of their time together becoming soft and faded like an old photograph, it wouldn’t feel like they were holding the lost pieces of his soul. If he forgot them, he would lose those pieces again. If they all forgot everything, no one would ever know what had happened to Eddie, no one would remember that he’d died a hero, no one would understand Stan and why he’d done what he’d done. It would be like killing them a second time. 

He couldn’t read the expressions of the blobs around him, but he heard a quiet gasp—from Bev, he thought. They’d leaned away from him after his joke but now they were huddling close again, not just to him but also to each other. Bill and Bev linked their arms together, Ben wrapping his own arms around both of them, and Mike reached across Richie’s shoulders to touch Bev. 

“What do you think, Mike?” Bill asked hoarsely. “Is this going to happen like last time? Are we going to f-f-fuh-forget again?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Now that It is dead, maybe it’ll be different. Or maybe—if we _choose_…”

Mike’s face was pressed against the back of Richie’s neck and when he spoke Richie could feel the puffs of his breath tickle his skin. “If we choose what?” Richie asked.

“If we connect deeper, too deep for this town to tear us apart again…”

Richie was sure that he must be reading too much into Mike’s words. This was just like him, always getting ahead of himself, always reading shit that wasn’t meant to be into others’ words or actions. To be tangled like this with four other adult bodies, three of them male, was doing to him things he was trying to ignore. He couldn’t feel the cold water anymore, although maybe this was just because he was getting numb. 

“If we connect,” Bill repeated in that thoughtful way of his, the tone he’d always used when making up a new game or deciding on a new course of action. It quieted some of Richie’s fears, filling him with that calm, familiar certainty that whatever it was, Bill would figure it out. 

“You have an idea, Bill?” Bev asked, that same childish faith reflected in her voice.

And what Bill thought was, apparently, the exact same fucking thing that Richie had thought and that he hadn’t dared name. Next thing Richie knew, the Bill blob face had moved and then Bill’s mouth was on Richie’s. _Holy fucking shit._ This was _Bill_ kissing him, Big Bill, the first and best and brightest of all of them, and Richie would be a liar—_liar, pants on fire_—if he said that he hadn’t thought about this one or ten times. Bill’s mouth was burning hot, probably because Richie’s face was chilled from the cold water, and it was insistent, demanding. Bill licked Richie’s lower lip until Richie opened his mouth, helpless to resist anything Bill wanted. A sound erupted from deep in his chest, a sound of need that he was immediately ashamed of. The mood whiplash from grieving—shit, Eddie was dead—to aroused—shit, Bill was tongue-fucking him—was too abrupt for his brain to catch up and his head was swimming from it.

Because craziness was catching, instead of splashing them with cold water like they were dogs going at it, the others just snuggled closer. Richie could feel Mike press small kisses along the side of his jaw. When Bill pulled away, Bev took his place, and then Ben. Richie kissed his friends until his lips felt raw. They all still smelled like sewage, were still pretty dirty—what would Eddie, what would Stan have said to this? They both would have hated it. _Richie_ should have found it gross and a turn-off, but it didn’t seem to matter to his body. It didn’t matter that Bev had tits, which Richie could feel press against his arm, and that tits had never done it for him no matter how hard that he’d tried, because this was Bev, their very own Bevvie who’d always been one of the guys in the ways that counted, and if she’d had a dick Richie would have been on it like ants on sugar. It didn’t matter if Richie had always thought that Ben was straighter than an arrow, he was now hotter than the sun and beyond that, inside he was still the same sweet fat kid they’d saved from Henry Bowers, Richie’s friend who cared too much and whose tastefully trimmed beard now scraped against Richie’s stubble. 

The insanity kept spreading and soon enough, Richie’s friends weren’t just making out with him but also with each other. Ben and Bev were kissing, like Ben had probably been dying to do for decades, and god, Richie wished he could see it for real instead of watching a blur of shapes and colors mixing together. Bill and Mike were also kissing over Richie’s shoulder, sandwiching him between their hard bodies—and oh, _ah_, hard in more ways than one, _hello, sir._ Richie could feel the bulge of Mike’s erection against the curve of his ass. Christ, but Mike Hanlon was _hung_. Richie couldn’t resist bearing down on it and he felt Mike’s hips buck forward in response. Daringly, he slipped a hand between himself and Bill and reached down blindly between Bill’s legs, cupping his crotch. 

Bill stopped kissing Mike, strangling a moan. “Jesus, Rich,” he whispered, his breath hot against the skin of Richie’s neck. “God.”

This was the signal for that party to get even raunchier. They became a tangle of groping hands and wet mouths, caressing, fondling and kissing and even licking—frantic with despair at first, spurred on by the raw fear that they might forget each other again, and then progressively getting more sensual and more tender. Richie ached with feeling—love, friendship, desire, blurring all together into one intense, overwhelming emotion, his heart filled to the brim and his dick about to explode. What were they to each other? Maybe there wasn’t a word for it, but this didn’t matter because right now, in that very moment, they were _with_ each other, present to each other in a way that erased everything else in the world. 

Richie had closed his mostly useless eyes, surrendering himself to sensations and to the vivid power of his own imagination, and yet when teeth grazed the shell of his ear, he knew it was Bev before he even heard her say, “What do you think Eds would do if he were here? Open up your jeans, take your dick in his hand? Maybe go under water and blow you?”

There was no way in hell or heaven that Eddie would go under dirty water to suck his dick, but fuck it, the laws of reality held no power over fantasies and the image was so hot that Richie groaned.

“Fucking hell, Bevvie,” he panted. “Do you kiss your friends with that mouth? What do you think Stan would do if he were here? Would he—would he—”

It was hard to find a suitably dirty reply for Bev, given that Richie remembered Stan as a kid and that made using him in sexy talk quite awkward. His attempt was thwarted by the feeling of a hand fondling his hard dick through his jeans—a large hand that Richie somehow identified without a doubt as Mike’s. It was uncomfortable, being jerked off in wet jeans and underwear, but the discomfort was largely overcome by the pleasure. Richie’s breathing hitched in his chest as he rode the wave of his impending orgasm, focusing on Mike’s hand and the sounds of his other friends kissing and groping each other. He pictured in his mind the different combinations—Ben and Bev, Bill and Bev, _Bill and Ben_—and it was to that last image that he finally came in his pants with a violent shudder, pleasure shooting through him in bright bursts. Oh, well, these clothes were probably ruined anyway. 

As he caught his breath he listened to the groans and moans of his friends as they came too, one after the other, like the string of rapid explosions that signaled a firework’s finale. Afterward they took a moment to breathe together, still loosely holding onto each other.

“Shit, guys,” Richie said at last with a tired chuckle. “The Losers’ Club gets off a good one!”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Bev said with a pointy elbow to his ribs.

“We needed that, I think,” Bill said. “We won’t let go of each other again.”

“I hope not,” Mike said with quiet fervor.

As they said it, Richie could feel the truth in their words, as if they were making it real just by believing it—not wishful thinking, but magical belief that rewrote the world, of the kind that had carried them when they’d defeated It. 

“In all seriousness, though,” Richie said. “I really can’t find my glasses and I can’t see shit without them.”

“What?” Ben said.

“Are you serious?” Bev said.

“If we don’t find them, you’re gonna have to lead me by the hand like fucking Ray Charles.”

“Goddamn it, Richie,” Bill said.

Splashes erupted around him as his friends dived in to look for his glasses. Left relatively alone, Richie took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. The ache of Eddie’s death was still there, lodged below his sternum like the residual pain from a punch, but the edge of his grief had blunted a little. Not letting go of each other also meant not letting go of Eddie and Stan. Losers would stick together, as they’d done in the past. They were the foundations they would rebuild themselves on.


End file.
